


and into the forest i go

by cherrykirsch



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Child Neglect, Death, Fear, Fear of Death, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Not as Violent as it Could Have Been, Stabbing, Strangling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 10:04:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18589021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrykirsch/pseuds/cherrykirsch
Summary: The forest and the ties it has to the Killers and the Survivors."And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul." - John Muir





	and into the forest i go

**Author's Note:**

> it's 11pm, i'm in a car, i'll edit the formatting but take this for now bc wow i love this game.

He is stumbling through the forest, half drunk and covered in dirt.

Glancing at his cracked watch, it is barely 2am, and his work party has left him deep within the labyrinth of trees and the darkness of the undergrowth, and he is hopelessly, awfully, dreadfully lost. He can feel his face as warm as an oven, stinging at the nip of the chilling wind as he pushes forward, an arm outstretched in front of him to push aside branches and vines or catch his fall when he stumbles. 

Figures he’d be ditched out in the wilderness and left to crawl out alone and tired, and it’s almost certain he’ll be laughed at when he trudges into work later. It was very much… lame of him, uncool—not that he’d ever been the cool one, of course.

He steps over a fallen log and at the last second the toe of his shoe catches, and he is catapulted forward into a crumpled pile on the ground.

Groaning, he flips himself over to stare up to the sky, his chest heaving and his nose filled with the smell of mulch and dirt, and he looks up and he stops. This sky isn’t the one he remembers; it isn’t his sky.

This sky is at twilight, and the dying light casts long shadows of the branches across the ground and the trunk of other trees that almost look skeletal, it fills him with an immediate sense of dread. He pulls himself up, and looks behind himself. Whatever log he tripped over is gone, and it is now replaced by a stone wall twice his height and topped with barbed wire.

Any chance of escape is futile.

He looks away, in front of him is a campfire, where a girl with hair the same colours of the fire is crouched, warming her hands and looking directly at him. It takes a moment of his eyes staring into hers for them both to move, just when he begins to pull himself to his feet, the girl stands and jogs over to him to help him up.

He glances backwards again at the wall.

“You can’t get out.” The girl says, and he is aware of the dried blood on the back of her neck. “Jake tried once. He still got into the Trial.”

She helps him down to the floor again, and he is suddenly aware of the woman sitting half in the light of the fire, a collection of plants and herbs in her lap. She seems to be sorting them into different piles, and when she glances up at him he looks away.

“Where…. Where are we?” He asks the girl, and she shrugs, settling down at the fire and returning to warming her hands. He watches her a moment as she stretches her arms, the fire crackles between them. He tries again. “Who are you? Both of you.”

The woman with the herbs looks up. “Claudette Morel.”

The girl looks at him. “Meg.” She says, tucking a lose lock of her hair behind her ear. “Thomas. Who are you?”

“Dwight Fairfield.” He says, and Meg nods at him. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Meg cracks a half-smile. “I would say the same,” she begins, moving her leg out from beneath her to stretch it out, giving him a pointed look. “But you won’t thing it’s nice much longer.”

Claudette tilts her head to the sky, frowning. “Shouldn’t be for a while now. Nobody’s back yet.” She says, and then she looks down and picks some of the herbs up. “he doesn’t have to worry for now.”

Dwight frowns. “Worry about what?” He asks as Claudette stands and reaches for a small stone mortar and pestle next to the fire and drops the herbs into the bowl. 

“The Trial.” Meg says as she begins to stretch out her other leg. “A set of us are gone, and we don’t know when it’s our turn. It won’t be until another person arrives anyway.”

Dwight’s frown deepens as he stares into the fire. “What is ‘The Trial’?” He asks. “Why am I even here? Is this some kind of… sick prank?”

Claudette looks up at him and fixes him with a nervous glance, her eyes darting around them. “We don’t know much; when four of us are sucked into a Trial we have to escape of die at the hands of a Killer.” She says very quietly, pausing for a moment as she looks around. “It’s… the Entity. It… craves a sacrifice.”

He stares for a moment, before he gestures between the three of them. “And… we’re the sacrifices? This… Entity-thing… it wants us to be its sacrifices?” He asks and she nods.

Meg pulls her knees up and begins to stretch out her arms, looking him up and down with an eyebrow raised. “You can escape of course, there’s always a chance. I’ve escaped. There’s generators, you have to repair five, and if you’re the last one, there’s the trapdoor.” She says it with a smile, and it does little to reassure him. “We each have something… unique about us, some perk that gives us a chance. The Entity is fair. I can run, I’m faster than Jake and most of the Killers and I can escape them in a heartbeat.”

Claudette looks up and then back down into the mortar and pestle. “With the right plants I can make tinctures that can heal people.” She says with a soft smile.

Meg eyes him up, her brows raised. “What can you do, Dwight?” She asks him and he freezes, looking back at her with the expression of a deer caught in the headlights. “What will give you the upper hand?”

Dwight pauses, wetting his chapped lips as he thinks desperately, and after a couple of minute she looks back at Meg with a sliver of confidence. “I know how to disappear.” He tells her as firmly as he can manage. “I know how to survive like that, being afraid is something I’m used to, it doesn’t scare me anymore.”

Meg stares at him, deep into his eyes and his mouth goes dry, and then a smile tugs at the corners of her lips and she looks back at the fire, clutching her knees to her chest. 

“It does sound like something. Hiding might be enough to let you survive your first Trial, if you do it right.”

* * *

Anna holds the child in her arms, and wonders what went wrong this time.

It was going so well, too. This new girl was perfect, she looks just as Anna did when she was a girl, lithe and raven haired and the potential to be more, although she did trip over frequently and had when Anna had watched her from afar. But she was perfect in every conceivable way, and she never wanted to lose her.

But she had died sometime in the night like all the other little girls, she was so tiny in her arms like this, curled up like a baby against her bosom. She unlocks the collar from around her daughter’s neck and pulls her just a little bit closer.

Carefully, Anna stands with the child in her arms and exits the tiny cabin and ventures out into the dim, autumn woods. Behind the cabin, a small walk into the woods is the graveyard of her other children, all beloved and beautiful and all who had left her too soon, one deep grave already open.

Before, she had planned to dump the elk bones here, but this would have to do for her daughter now. She lowers her daughter in and covers her with a thin blanket, and then she seizes the shovel from the pile of dirt and mulch, and begins to fill the grave.

It takes hours, but soon her daughter’s body is covered by a mound of dirt and Anna digs the shovel back into the ground and returns to the cabin. She cleans up the corner of the room that was her daughter’s; she polishes the collar and redoes the stuffing around the inside (she’d hate it if her daughter hurt herself), and straightens out the bedding and the pillow and the tiny, dirty, and matted bunny toy.

Beneath the mask, she smiles. A perfect room for a child, to protect her from the world and make sure she never gets lost.

Anna straightens up and reaches into her closet for her hatchets, steps out into the wilderness and fixes her eyes on the town that she knows is beyond the ocean of trees, and she smiles again, and then she begins the decent down to the town, an eerie hum falling from her lips.

The woods are unforgiving. 

The woods and its inhabitants had killed her mother and left her alone, and she hunted that elk down out of sheer anger and bloodlust, felt a thrill when blood spurted from its neck and it was fell before her. It was elk and wolves at first, and then people who had wandered to close and it was… different hunting a person, the thrill was something that she could only imagine a wolf felt as its teeth sunk into the soft neck of a fox.

Finally, she was the predator instead of the prey. 

When the wanderers grew too scarce, the village grew to know her. She found a family, and killed all of them except their daughter, their little girl, and she could never bring herself to raise a hatchet towards a girl. Little girls had to be kept safe, and she so, so tried to keep each one of her children safe.

And yet.

She thinks of the grave behind her cabin, the burial of her latest daughter just this morning and her heart squeezed in her chest. She doesn’t know what went wrong, and everything had been going so well.

Anna pushes open the backdoor to the house, the father of the house turning to discern the direction of the humming, and she quickly and enthusiastically buries the blade of her hatchet into his skull.

_ This time _ , she assures,  _ nothing will go wrong. _

* * *

Jake shoves himself up against a rock, his hand clutching his side and tries not to make any noise. This escape had been too close, trying to seize Meg off the hook with Trapper not even ten meters away, and his escape had landed him with a nasty gash to the side and having lost Meg.  _ Again _ .

He curses under his breath and throws his head back against the rock, screwing his eyes shut and he begins a mental checklist.

Two generators down; three to go, Meg escaped to the east, the Trapper came after him; He hadn’t seen Dwight the entire map except for a glimpse at the beginning of the trial; and Min was as absent as usual, and he would bet that one of the generators was her doing. It was honestly a miracle that one of them hadn’t been picked off yet.

Jake peeks around the rock, checking around him before he gets up, crouched over and begins to walk east, back towards the hook and where Meg ran off. Maybe this was stupid, it was reckless, Meg could be anywhere by now, and with that he stops and turns around to head west instead.

The generator is wedged behind tall wooden pallets and as he draws closer, he notices Dwight hunched over by it. He waves, and Dwight looks over and nods at the generator, taking a glance around him before he jerks his head and Jake quickly crosses through the grass over to the other side of the generator, his hands already itching to reach for the wires.

The gentle thrumming of whirring machinery is almost comforting to him by now, and when he meets Dwight’s eyes, he smiles and Dwight cracks a half one in return.

“Have you seen Meg?” Dwight asks, his voice barely above a whisper and his eyes back down at his hands and Jake nods though he can’t see it. “Her getting unhooked, was that you?”

“Yeah.” Jake says equally as softly. “Went east. Have you seen Min?”

Dwight nods quickly. “Twice.” He says, nodding his head to the left. “I saw her working on a generator and again just a couple of minutes ago in the house.”

Somewhere, a dull ring echoes across the field and for a moment both men stop to look up and then they quickly resume their previous work, hands working faster and eyes glancing up every other second. 

“Two to go.” Jake says, and Dwight nods, lips pursed as he concentrates at his hands. “Won’t be long until—”

Dwight fumbles, just for a moment, but it’s enough and the generator backfires in an explosion of white sparks as they both remove their hands from the interior in time. Dwight scrambles back, hands over his mouth and Jake immediately shoves his hands over his own mouth.

For a sickeningly chilling moment, the sound of his thundering heart is deafening and then something that is both as cold as ice and as hot as embers digs into his back and he immediately crumples to the ground.

Dwight is frozen across from him, eyes wide and hands still clasped over his mouth as Jake is picked up by the middle and thrown over Trapper’s shoulder, and from his position, Jake looks down into Dwight’s eyes, blood dripping from his mouth.

**_Run_ ** . He mouths.

And Dwight does just as the dull echo that signals another complete generator rings out across the field. 

The Trapper pauses for a moment, and then continues forward as Jake struggles, wiggling as much as he can in his grasp to try and escape, his fingernails dragging marks in the leather on his back and his firsts thumping, and, to his dread and horror, they reach the hook too soon, and all he feels as Trapper impales his shoulder on the hook is ice-hot pain and he screams.

The Trapper never sticks around, probably going back to the generator to break it, so he doesn’t even see Jake as he struggles to pull himself off the hook and fails, only serving the drive it in deeper, his teeth grit as he slumps back, his entire body feeling too heavy and too light all at once.

Hands are on him them, pulling him up of off the hook with a loss of pressure that makes him gasp, and he stares into Meg’s eyes and he wild grin, the blood dripping down from her head to her shoulder and he smiles back.

“Always getting you out of trouble,” She says and he lets out a breathy laugh.

“Could say the same for you.” He replies as they stagger down from the hook and off into the trees. “How did you get away?”

Meg smirks. “I’m fast. I ran too far too fast and he got bored and left me, did he find you at the generator that backfired?”

Jake nods, wincing as he limps and crouches behind a wooden pallet. “Must’ve been close before though, we just slipped up and he was just… behind me.” He says as Meg crouches over him, med-supplies in her hands, frowning down at him.

“‘We?”” She asks.

Jake nods. “Me and Dwight.” He tells her, wincing again as she applies bandages to his arm. “Told him to run, so he’s off somewhere now. It was luck that you were close to where I got hooked. Have you seen Min at all?”

Meg shakes her head, brows furrowed. “We never see Min; you know that better than anyone. She doesn’t like grouping up.” She says, pulling back as she finishes the bandage to tuck the leftovers in her pocket. “Dwight better not be banged up too because I don’t have enough supplies left.”

“He’s not.” Jake assures with a shake of his head. “He’s managed to evade the traps and Trapper.”

Meg huffs in a way that sounds like she’s almost impressed. “Hm.” She says. 

Jake elbows her side. “Don’t pretend that you’re not impressed.”

“Fine. It is impressive.” She says with a roll of her eyes before she peeks over the hole in the pallet and looks around. “I think it’s safe to move now. Are you all good?”

“Should be.” 

Jake straightens up and follows Meg out of the cover of the pallets and trees towards the nearest generator. Glancing around him as he ran, there was neither a sign of the other two survivors or of the Trapper himself, and Jake didn’t know which one was more off-putting. 

“Meg.” Jake hisses as Meg crouches down by generator, hands already fiddling with the wires. Jake stays back, every nerve ending on fire. “Meg. Stop.”

Meg barely glances back. “We don’t have time, Jake, come on.”

“This doesn’t feel right, c’mon, let’s go find a different generator.” He urges, desperation crawling into his words as he gestures Meg to follow him. “Meg. Please.”

Meg stops, turning to face him with an eyebrow raised, and her mouth open to reply, and then she takes one step forward and a sickening crunch fills the air. Jake can only stare in shock at Meg’s wide eyed stare and then pounce on her the minute she begins to scream, clasping a hand over her mouth.

She heaves against him, eyes wild and darting around their surroundings as he does the same, and then the Trapper plants the blade of his knife into Meg’s shoulder. 

Jake drops her in a hurry, and stumbles backwards as Trapper picks Meg up around the waist and carries her to the hook directly in front of them.

Jake turns to scramble away into the woods only for the blade of Trapper’s knife to bite into his shoulder again. He hisses and hunches over, and just as he goes to vault over a fallen wooden pallet, Trapper slashes at his back and he falls into the grass and dirt, wheezing and oozing blood.

The Trapper flips him over, and the last thing he sees before he wakes up heaving next to the campfire is the sickening smile of the Trapper’s mask as he is hacked to death.

* * *

Her pretty fingers around their neck and the sound of their manic, hysteric crying quieted by the choking, their own fingers (nails clipped short) scrambling for purchase on her, to try and pull her off. But she wouldn’t let go. This was… the only way… the right way, the only way to finally get them all to  _ shut up. _

She grits her teeth as further screaming fills her ears. Ow much did she had to give for them to just stop.

_ Shut Up. _

Her fingers dig into the soft flesh as another one goes limp under her hands, but she waits a few moments longer just in case before she moves onto the next one. She had seen too much, and gives to much of her mind just to land herself here again, bathed in screams and crying and desperation from the same people who smashed their heads against the walls and tables until they bled.

The worst thing she had seen is a patient with a handgun who had shot himself in the head. He hadn’t died; he had blown off most of his face and jaw instead, and what was left was bloody, fleshy and broken beyond repair. He lived for three days in moaning and shambling, his cries haunting her shift until he passed away early in the morning.

She listened to him crying, begging for death and she just wanted quiet. She wanted him to be quiet. She wanted him to be at peace instead of being forced to live in pain.

Like everyone in this damn place was forced to live.

“Don’t you understand?” She said to the patient clawing at her wrists, tears dripping down her cheeks. “Don’t you understand I’m trying to help?”

When it all got too much, when touching the people she wanted to save became too much, she took the scissors rested on the bedside table and plunges the blades into their eyes, aiming directly for the brain. Her medical knowledge beyond that of basic nursing was limited, but she knew that this would cause less suffering for them.

It would be quick and easy. Painless, almost.

_ It’s bedtime now. _

She didn’t know when, or at what number she forced herself, but when her superiors found her the next morning, she knew something inside of her had snapped and it felt… she felt agitated, she could only rock back and forth and keep moving and keep doing something. She saw the same doctors in white coats that he used to work with and she was loaded up into an ambulance to be taken elsewhere, a guard beside her and two more in the front.

Crazy. Unhinged.

Was she though? She didn’t see how; She was helping those people, those who were suffering and would suffer and she freed them. How did that make her unhinged? Why was she getting packed up to go to the very place she despised and wanted to free others from?

The ambulance passes by the first tree and Sally pauses before she reaches into her pockets and removes a small knife, plunging it into the guard’s neck. His body slumping caused enough of a distraction that was room enough for her to stab the driver’s neck and send the ambulance spiraling into a tree where it connected with a sickening crash.

The back-door pops open as easily as if it were well-oiled and she steps down and out, breathing in the scent of the forest as she drops the knife into the dirt and wanders into the tree-line, her fingertips dancing across the rough bark.

The forest is thick and as silent as death and it is the solace she needs. This forest is forgiving, and it breathes with her, the blood of people on her hands and she doesn’t feel sinking regret. Her husband has worked in a forest, in lumber, and the forest had killed him, had it not?

Not that it mattered.

There was more for her now. The forest breathes her name and draws her in, and Sally isn’t herself anymore. She is a different entity entirely.

It feels too good.

  
  



End file.
